An inmate at the Jefferson City Correctional Center was sentenced to the maximum punishment of 15 more years in the Missouri Department of Corrections today after he was convicted by a Cole County jury earlier this year for choking a corrections officer.

While being forcibly removed from his cell at Jefferson City Correctional Center on August 28, 2008, for failing to obey prison regulations, Demun D. Walker was able to briefly pin down a corrections officer and choke the officer before other corrections officers restrained Walker. The corrections officer testified at trial before a Cole County jury on January 28, 2011. The jury convicted Walker of the class B felony of committing violence against an employee of the Department of Corrections. A class B felony by law carries a maximum punishment of 15 years imprisonment, to which Presiding Judge Patricia S. Joyce sentenced Walker today, with the sentence to run consecutive to the prison time he is currently serving. Walker will not be able to begin serving the 15-year sentence for this offense until he serves the prison time on the sentences of the other offenses for which he is incarcerated.

"With this sentence today, Walker and other inmates at the correctional facilities in Cole County are reminded that assaulting corrections officers and other personnel will not be tolerated," said Cole County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Jonathan Bertz, who tried the case for the State. "Corrections officers do not have easy jobs, and they deserve to know that the community and the courts will back them up when one of the most dangerous members of society assaults them."